As Sigit’s cadre of systematic historians travel through
branching time, they practice the art of curating library
furniture. Thankfully, there is usually free surplus to acquire. To
a systematic historian, every study carrel and reshelving cart,
covered in residual fiberdust, announces its heritage in a loud,
regulated voice: Was it made before or after the Geneva Convention?
Did colonialism or socialism come first? Rocket launch or space
elevator?

For the purpose of recovering phylogeny, the most useful
features are the least consequential and least correlated: “junk
events” such as the conclusion of wars, the exchange of promises,
and the migration of bodies. That’s the real reason why systematic
historians love diasporas. Like a junk gene, a junk event is copied
and mutated by chance without much affecting the branching rate of
a history, but like a borrowed word or a healed wound, it indelibly
dents the design space of artifacts that a civilization will
consider and consume in its future. Mostly, people prefer their
artifacts to remind them of the past either head-on or not at all.
To be sure, a junk event may well hurt or please many people, and
in that sense they are consequential, but what we’re talking about
is the fitness of a possibility, not of a person. The ideal junk
event is one that “commutes” with all other events—one that does
not affect their availability.

In neighborhoods of history where the study of systematics
flourishes, the value of junk events is more widely recognized,
which makes them unusable. Thus, systematic historians validate an
ironic sort of uncertainty principle: they know the least about
their own home, the surrounding possibilities closest to them.
That’s what makes Sigit’s group so precious, its mere
existence.

To ease their own jobs, many systematic historians like to
introduce events that, within their home time-branches, promote the
preservation and proliferation of junk events. In our own
time-branch, for example, the best known “junk promoter” is the
advent of fashion. Of course, a junk promoter is most effective
when it is introduced at an early (perhaps pre-historical) time,
its home time-branch being accordingly larger. But are junk
promoters themselves junk events? This is a question of research
ethics that is best not raised in polite company.